This gorgeous fish soup is quick and easy to make, rich in flavor, and filled with healthy fats. It’s also really delicious; a weeknight meal you’ll want to make over and over again But the real reason to check out this recipe is that it’s a perfect example of how (and why) you should cook with unrefined red palm oil.

Unrefined red palm oil is incredibly dense with antioxidants and vitamins. Full-spectrum Vitamin E, co-enzyme Q10, betacarotenes, vitamin A, and vitamin K…they’re all there in abundance. There’s no secret to cooking with red palm oil, just use it in the same way that you use coconut oil, butter or olive oil. Sauté anything in red palm oil (meat, seafood, veggies, eggs), use palm oil to roast vegetables, or add it to soups or stews.

In this recipe, red palm oil is added at the end to give the soup broth an incredibly rich, velvety texture. But what about the flavor, you ask? It’s true that the strong flavor of unrefined red palm oil can take some getting use to. If you find it off-putting, then look for brands like Nutiva (our favorite) that put the oil through a cold-filtration process that mellows the flavor considerably. Nutiva’s unrefined red palm oil has such a mild flavor that it’s barely even noticeable.

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Flash back to 2012: we felt sick every day, counted calories religiously, felt guilty after eating any kind of food…we were fueled by low self-esteem and disorderly eating.

We’d both just completed a 12 week diet and exercise plan—not designed for health, but designed to lose weight. We reached our goal weights (aka stick thin) BUT along with our “perfect bodies” we were tired, moody, cold all the time and our periods completely stopped. Definitely not healthy and definitely not happy. Which was strange…because we’d always say, “When I weigh XX kilos…THEN I’ll be happy.”

How often do we bemoan people’s lack of expectations around their health? Their passivity. Their inertia. Their apathy. (Perhaps our own.) They just don’t seem to care or even expect that good health would offer them enough to justify the effort. I can feel heads shaking out there. Personally, I don’t get it either.

On the other hand, there are those people who hold good health on all encompassing pedestals. Maybe you know a few – or have identified as one yourself at some point. They’re the folks who believe that if they can only lose X pounds or get into great shape or achieve washboard abs that everything else in life will finally come together. They’d finally be happy, successful and otherwise “worthy.” And their thinking becomes a distortion that tells them they flat-out can’t be those things until they’ve achieved their physical end goals (as if there is such a thing). As odd as it might sound to some, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen latch onto this panacea principle.

I’m not interested in talking about Supreme Court decisions, the Affordable Health Care Act or for-profit versus non-profit business models. No, today I have something else in mind. It’s a perspective on health insurance that gets almost no attention at all despite the high costs and even higher stakes.

Let’s look at an actual definition first. From Wikipedia: “Health insurance is insurance against the risk of incurring medical expenses among individuals.” And can those darn expenses ever get expensive… Just as budget experts and lifestyle minimalists advise that the best price is no price when that’s an option, I’d argue the same principle applies here. The cheapest health bill is no bill. And what if our daily choices could help make this possible?

The Primal Blueprint Podcast

Interviews with Mark Sisson and other health experts. Audio versions of select Mark’s Daily Apple posts each week. “Best of MDA” recordings. Fresh, lively content to help you stay at the cutting edge of Primal living!